Many charter schools were operating business as usual during the first week of the LAUSD teacher strike. This one, Alliance Dr. Olga Mohan High School in Los Angeles, which is not part of LAUSD, does not suffer the kind of issues many public school teachers deal with, such as large class sizes. (Photo by Bradley Bermont)

While tens of thousands Los Angeles Unified School District teachers marched through Grand Park on Friday, two miles away, students inside small red and white bungalows kept working.

It was a normal day for the Alliance Dr. Olga Mohan High School, a charter school that’s nestled under a tangle of freeways in downtown Los Angeles.

Charter schools like Alliance aren’t part of LAUSD. Though the district approved its charter in 2004, it operates with its own board. So students have largely been insulated from this week’s drama. But, on podiums and in social circles, many striking teachers and union leaders have pointed to charters like it as a reason for LAUSD’s dysfunction.

Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which is representing teachers in their fight against the giant district, has repeatedly bemoaned the “unregulated growth of charter schools.”

Los Angeles has more charter schools – and more students enrolled in them – than any other city in the country.

In multiple press conferences this week, Caputo-Pearl called for additional oversight and a cap on the number of charters in the county. Since school funding follows students, the district loses money every time a student chooses to enroll in a charter school; Caputo-Pearl expressed concern that charters were draining the district’s resources. And, when one in five public school students in Los Angeles are attending charters, he may have a point.

But, charter school proponents say, it’s not that simple.

“I don’t believe in education opportunity by zip code,” explained Gloria Romero, a former state senator and co-founder of Scholarship Prep, a network of three charter schools across Southern California.

If a neighborhood school isn’t performing well, and private schools aren’t financially feasible, a charter can offer an escape route.

“To some extent, charters are an underground railway in education to support those in need,” Romero said.

While they’re available and valuable in any neighborhood, she said that they most benefit low-income communities of color.

Ben Feinberg, an LAUSD math teacher at Luther Burbank Middle School in Highland Park, who spent half of his 11-year career in charters, knows that a well-placed charter school can be a game-changer for students in need, offering stability and safety for students with challenging home lives. However, in the past year, he watched as two charter schools failed and were forced to close. One school, PUC iPrep in Eagle Rock, he noted, shut its doors four days after the start of the school year.

“That creates a lack of trust in schools,” he said. “It creates a tenuous environment for our students when they need something strong and supportive.”

The school said that it closed after too few students enrolled – only 114 students – less than half of what school administrators said they needed to keep the doors open. Which brings the conversation back to the charter school caps that have been championed by Caputo-Pearl and the union. If there was a cap on their growth, he has argued, schools wouldn’t be popping up in areas where the student population is already stretched too thin.

But, this is the last thing that Romero would want to see. For her, the market should decide which schools survive or flounder.

“A moratorium is trapping people into situations where kids aren’t getting educated,” she said. “Would you put a moratorium on how many restaurants can exist? What about grocery stores? What about churches? If we believe in freedom of choice, we allow the people to choose,” she said.

However, Feinberg, whose views are slightly friendlier to charter schools than the larger union opinion, said that he supports a studied approach to charter school expansion.

Before a charter is founded, it goes through a rigorous approval process involving hundreds of pages of paperwork, asking for every single detail of the potential school, but it doesn’t account for that school’s effect on the larger system.

“I would really like the equivalent of an environmental review process for charter schools,” Feinberg said. “We’re not doing that right now. We’re not saying, ‘How is this one school opening up going to affect enrollment and the offerings of all the schools around it?’”

Last year, the LAUSD school board approved 10 new charter school petitions and denied five. Romero, who is opening a new school next year in Lomita-Harbor City, was behind one of the approved petitions.

Every five years, the school’s charter must be renewed. Last year, 54 were renewed and only five were denied by LAUSD. Three charters closed on their own, according to the district. While Romero was impressed with the thoroughness of the approval process, she said that the renewal process may be too lenient.

“Not every charter should be renewed,” she said. “I have been surprised, quite frankly, at some of the charter schools that LA Unified has renewed, given the data and outcomes.”

Scott Schmerelson, who represents the 5th district on the school board, said that a charter renewal will only be denied if an evaluation reveals poor instructional, operational, or fiscal management. The most common reason that renewals get denied, he said, is fiscal mismanagement. But Romero believes that instructional quality should play a bigger role.

“If a charter sinks below the district average for schools, then that charter shouldn’t be in existence,” she said. “Especially after a five-year run.”

She’s careful not to ask for more oversight — she doesn’t want to see any more paperwork or bureaucratic hoops to jump through — but she’d like to see new systems put in place to more rigorously monitor a school’s academic results. She wants to see charter schools raising the bar for academic performance. That’s the point of competition, she said, and that’s where LAUSD is lacking.

“I’m not here to save LA Unified. I’m here to challenge LA Unified to do a better job. And if they do a better job, parents will choose them,” she said.

Feinberg, on the other hand, who wouldn’t call himself a fan of the charter movement, said he recognizes that they’re part of the education landscape today – a landscape that LAUSD needs to account for and make the appropriate adjustments to compete.

“The [school] choice movement has won,” he said. “One of their key visions is that choice inherently helps education – that idea has won out. But if we’re going to survive in that climate, we need the resources to also compete.”

Coming from the charter world, Feinberg is frustrated with some of LAUSD’s policy decisions and sees several areas where LAUSD could be beating charters, but said that the district is falling short.

“Most charters I know don’t offer a nurse, they don’t have a library or a librarian, and they often have part-time social workers that transfer between different schools,” he said. “Because of that, they have a clear weakness, where LAUSD has an opportunity to compete.”

But LAUSD isn’t competing in those arenas.

That’s part of the reason why Feinberg said that he’s striking this week – additional support services are a cornerstone of the union’s demands, not just to compete with charter schools, but because the services are critical for their students.

“Many [charters] also have no football program, no basketball program. Some of them do, but most operate in converted warehouses, converted churches, in schools that have been built recently – very small spaces sometimes,” he said. “It doesn’t affect their academics, but it does affect the school offerings that parents care about. And that’s a place where we can really compete and that’s why I’m striking, so we can offer those things to parents.”

‘Hubs of experimentation’

When charters were first approved in the early 1990s, they were conceived as incubators for new teaching methods. The goal was to feed those techniques back into the traditional public-school system, but that hasn’t happened, according to Schmerelson.

“I am unaware of a single practice that started in a charter school and was taken to scale in an LAUSD school,” he wrote in an email to Southern California News Group.

Caputo-Pearl, in a press-conference on Tuesday, echoed the sentiment and said that charters had lost their way. Even Romero, an unabashed proponent of charter schools, recognized that charters largely haven’t impacted LAUSD’s classroom practices, though she blames the school district.

Feinberg doesn’t know who to blame but said that he’s seen limited interaction between charters and traditional public schools in his 11 years as a teacher. However, he suggested that it may be a problem that’s localized to Los Angeles.

“When [charters] first opened up in LA, they were hubs of experimentation. And that’s still how they are in many parts of California,” he said. “But, very quickly, in the early 2000s, many of them discovered the benefits of scale.”

That’s what he saw when he worked for Aspire, a charter network with 40 schools, most of them in California. He worked there from 2008 to 2013 and said that they were “on a warpath to open up 78 charter schools. The reason was because it would pay for their home office.”

This was part of the strategy as Alliance expanded throughout the early 2000s, said Catherine Suitor, chief advancement officer for charter network. In 12 years, they opened 28 schools. As it shifted from a single charter school into a charter network, their overhead costs came down.

By running things like human-resources and information technology services out of a primary office, school principals are freed up to focus on the school, not on accounting problems, Suitor said.

“That’s why you have major charter operators in Los Angeles,” Feinberg explained. “They benefit from the scale of their system. In the district, we also benefit from scale, but we don’t use it. We need to use that scale to offer things that parents want, like class size reduction, and nurses, and librarians.”

It’s unclear what the district will change about charter schools, if they change anything at all, but charters have clearly become a favorite punching bag for the union. Not that it bothers any of the students at Alliance.

During a campus visit to Alliance, a Southern California News Group reporter spoke to six juniors and seniors about their experience at the school and found a sharp contrast to the strike happening on the other side of the freeway.

As LAUSD teachers complained about overcrowded classrooms, sometimes with 40 or more students, the students at Alliance said that their largest classes hardly had 30 students in them; most had little more than 20 students.

Wendy Figuroa, a senior who came into the school as a freshman reading at a sixth-grade level, credits the individualized attention with improving her literacy. She’s slated to graduate this year while enrolled in AP Literature.

And, while LAUSD teachers are marching to get full-time guidance counselors and nurses, Alliance has both already – something that senior Edgar Lopez noted was a selling point of the school. According to Assistant Principal King, they have full-time counselors who are each assigned about 150 students.

On the district side of things, Feinberg recalled one counselor he saw at the protest who held a picket sign that said she had more than 800 students.

Success stories like the ones seen at Alliance are part of the reason why both Feinberg and Romero say the union’s vitriol against charters is misplaced.

Being the villain doesn’t bother Romero.

“I absolutely think that charters have moved us forward,” she said. “If we’re the boogeyman, then we’re doing something right.

Bradley Bermont is a reporter in Los Angeles. He covers city hall and school board meetings for Pasadena, Pico Rivera, and El Monte. His work has been featured on KPCC, KQED, the Daily Beast, and others. He is the proud owner of a mostly toothless, asthmatic cat who believes she is a dog.

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